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Google says Panda 4.2 update coming this month

It’s been over eight months since Google’s last Panda update, but news out of SMX Advanced (held in Seattle last week) is that the next one will be in 2–4 weeks.

Panda is designed to detect low-quality website content and demote or remove it from search engine rankings.

One reason that the SEO community has been impatient for a new rollout of Panda is that sites that have previously been penalised for thin content will then be re-evaluated. If appropriate changes have been made, it’s possible that the new update will eventually produce increased traffic for these sites.

Speaking at the show which was held in Seattle last week, Google’s Gary Illyes referred to the next update as a data refresh rather than an algorithmic change. He said that Panda requires manual updates, whereas other algorithms are automated. And it’s not updated more frequently because after each update or refresh Google needs to gather data on its impact, and sometimes there are problems or noise with the data resulting in delays.

Why should you care?

If you’ve previously been affected by Panda and have taken steps to improve your website content, you’ve been waiting for this welcome news.

Google will keep on tweaking its algorithms (thousands of updates are made each year) with the goal of providing the most relevant and valuable search results for a given query.

Jeremy and Mark are two of the partners behind SureFire Search. Despite their deceptively youthful appearances, both have worked in search marketing for many years. To put that in context, Google didn't even exist when Jeremy started.